andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-71 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Judah Guber writes about his new company : What we have done with Ultrinsic is created a system of incentives for students to allow them to invest in their ability to achieve a certain grade and when they achieve that grade we reward them with a cash incentive on top of receiving their original investment. This helps remove one of the large barriers students have to studying and staying motivated over the course of long semesters of college by giving them rewards on a much more immediate basis. We have been doing a pilot program in 2 schools, NYU and Penn, for the past year or so, and are currently in the process of a major roll out of our services to 37 schools all across the country. This is due to our popularity and inquiries from students in tons of schools all around the country regarding getting Ultrinsic’s services in their school. In the Fall 2010 semester, Ultrinsic will be revolutionizing student motivation on a grand scale . This is the dream of many economists: to c
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1 This helps remove one of the large barriers students have to studying and staying motivated over the course of long semesters of college by giving them rewards on a much more immediate basis. [sent-2, score-0.642]
2 We have been doing a pilot program in 2 schools, NYU and Penn, for the past year or so, and are currently in the process of a major roll out of our services to 37 schools all across the country. [sent-3, score-0.242]
3 This is due to our popularity and inquiries from students in tons of schools all around the country regarding getting Ultrinsic’s services in their school. [sent-4, score-0.508]
4 In the Fall 2010 semester, Ultrinsic will be revolutionizing student motivation on a grand scale . [sent-5, score-0.276]
5 This is the dream of many economists: to change the cost benefit analysis of people to cause them to improve themselves and to even allow them to put them in control of this change. [sent-6, score-0.717]
6 Our system is forever sustainable because we earn a profit on motivating students to improve their performance, there will always be a motivation to sustain this program. [sent-7, score-0.639]
7 Judah Guber: Ultrinsic makes money by the discrepancy of the contributions and payouts between the students who achieve their target grade and those who don’t. [sent-11, score-0.536]
8 However, another very important aspect to our business model is our offering of our many ancillary services to students once we reach critical mass from the college market, which should not be too far off based on our current roll-out schedule. [sent-12, score-0.574]
9 (As you are probably aware, we give a lot of A’s in college classes as it is. [sent-14, score-0.254]
10 We plan to limit the size of the incentives a student can acquire at least initially so, that no student can game us out of too much money while we are adjusting our system into the college market. [sent-17, score-0.986]
11 If it does happen, that someone games the system one semester, we could easily course correct and customize those odds for that eventuality. [sent-18, score-0.323]
12 Lastly, by analyzing the students performance in other classes that they have already taken we can predict how the student will do in a current class. [sent-20, score-0.502]
13 AG: You write that your system is “the dream of many economists: to change the cost benefit analysis of people to cause them to improve themselves and to even allow them to put them in control of this change. [sent-23, score-0.903]
14 ” I assume that the ultimately benefit for a student to get good grades is far larger, on average, than the amount that they would win from going on your site. [sent-24, score-0.352]
15 Thus, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that you’re trying to change students’ immediate cost-benefit calculations by taking a long-term benefit and moving it closer into view? [sent-25, score-0.645]
16 Judah Guber: Yes, you are absolutely right that the program changes students’ immediate cost-benefit calculations by causing them to take a long-term benefit and moving the benefit closer into view. [sent-26, score-0.672]
17 However, the student is the one who is in control of this change because they can decide what kind of incentives they want and how much they want. [sent-27, score-0.499]
18 We do have a very strong belief in education so, ideally we would want to give someone as much motivation as possible to do as well as possible on their grades. [sent-29, score-0.26]
19 Since schools and education first came into our society many things have changed in our daily lives, save for a lot of aspects of education and the grading systems we have. [sent-30, score-0.332]
20 We see Ultrinsic as the service that helps the education system evolve much like everything has. [sent-32, score-0.472]
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Introduction: Judah Guber writes about his new company : What we have done with Ultrinsic is created a system of incentives for students to allow them to invest in their ability to achieve a certain grade and when they achieve that grade we reward them with a cash incentive on top of receiving their original investment. This helps remove one of the large barriers students have to studying and staying motivated over the course of long semesters of college by giving them rewards on a much more immediate basis. We have been doing a pilot program in 2 schools, NYU and Penn, for the past year or so, and are currently in the process of a major roll out of our services to 37 schools all across the country. This is due to our popularity and inquiries from students in tons of schools all around the country regarding getting Ultrinsic’s services in their school. In the Fall 2010 semester, Ultrinsic will be revolutionizing student motivation on a grand scale . This is the dream of many economists: to c
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Introduction: There’s been some discussion lately about grade inflation. Here’s a graph from Stuart Rojstaczer ( link from Nathan Yau): Rojstaczer writes: In the 1930s, the average GPA at American colleges and universities was about 2.35, a number that corresponds with data compiled by W. Perry in 1943. By the 1950s, the average GPA was about 2.52. GPAs took off in the 1960s with grades at private schools rising faster than public schools, lulled in the 1970s, and began to rise again in the 1980s at a rate of about 0.10 to 0.15 increase in GPA per decade. The grade inflation that began in the 1980s has yet to end. . . . These trends may help explain why private school students are disproportionately represented in Ph.D. study in science and engineering and why they tend to dominate admission into the most prestigious professional schools. People have discussed why the grades have been going up and whether this is a bad thing. I have a slightly different take on all this. As a t
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Introduction: Jemes Keirstead sends along this infographic : He hates it: First we’ve got an hourglass metaphor wrecked by the fact that “now” (i.e. the pinch point in the glass) is actually 3-5 years in the future and the past sand includes “up to three years” in the future. Then there are the percentages which are appear to represent a vertical distance, not volume of sand or width of the hourglass. Add to that a strange color scheme in which green goes from dark to light to dark again. I know January’s not even finished yet, but surely a competitor for worst infographic of 2013? Keirstead doesn’t even comment on what I see as the worst aspect of the graph, which is that the “3-5 years” band is the narrowest on the graph, but expressed as a per-year rate it is actually the highest of all the percentages. The hourglass visualization does the astounding feat of taking the period where the executives expect the highest rate of change and presenting it as a minimum in the graph.
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